Horses That Come Back on Their Own, and Bad Men Met Without Blame

Opposition opens with two instructions that both amount to leaving things alone. Legge's translation says occasion for repentance will disappear, that a man who loses his horses need not go after them because they will return of themselves, and that meeting bad men brings no error. Nothing in the line is done. Its whole counsel is a pair of refusals, one against pursuit and one against exclusion, and in a figure about estrangement those turn out to be the same refusal twice.

The horses matter because pursuit in a time of general disunion converts a loss into a quarrel. What has gone will come back if it belongs, and chasing it guarantees a confrontation with whoever is holding it. The bad men matter for the mirror reason. When people are already set against one another, refusing contact with everybody who looks unsuitable narrows a person's world to nothing, and the classic states plainly that the contact carries no blame.

This is the only line in the hexagram standing in its correct place, strong in an odd seat at the foot of the lower trigram Dui. Every other stroke in the figure is misplaced by the ordinary rule, which is as exact a structural picture of estrangement as the classic draws anywhere. Being the one correctly seated line is why this one can afford to be passive. It has nothing to repair, and its counsel is aimed entirely at not manufacturing something to repair.